1 42 CREATIVE EVOLUTION 



Vegetative torpor, instinct, and intelligence these, 

 then, are the elements that coincided in the vital im 

 pulsion common to plants and animals, and which, 

 in the course of a development in which they were 

 made manifest in the most unforeseen forms, have 

 been dissociated by the very fact of their growth. The 

 cardinal error which, from Aristotle onwards, has -vitiated 

 most of the philosophies of nature, is to see in vegetative, 

 instinctive and rational life, three successive degrees of the 

 development of one and the same tendency, whereas they 

 are three divergent directions of an activity that has split 

 up as it grew. The difference between them is not a 

 difference of intensity, nor, more generally, of degree, 

 but of kind. 



It is important to investigate this point. We have 

 seen in the case of vegetable and animal life how they 

 are at once mutually complementary and mutually 

 antagonistic. Now we must show that intelligence and 

 instinct also are opposite and complementary. But 

 let us first explain why we are generally led to regard 

 them as activities of which one is superior to the other 

 and based upon it, whereas in reality they are not things 

 of the same order : they have not succeeded one 

 another, nor can we assign to them different grades. 



It is because intelligence and instinct, having origin 

 ally been interpenetrating, retain something of their 

 common origin. Neither is ever found in a pure state. 

 We said that in the plant the consciousness and mobility 

 of the animal, which lie dormant, can be awakened ; and 

 that the animal lives under the constant menace of being 

 drawn aside to the vegetative life. The two tendencies 

 that of the plant and that of the animal were so 

 thoroughly interpenetrating, to begin with, that there has 



